I will tell you what happened on this date, in 1942. It isn’t good.
Sometimes, events line up like dominoes. And once you tip one, the whole bunch of them start falling, one right after the other. Such is the case here.
Prior to the United States “Official” involvement in World War II, a tremendous amount of turmoil was taking place on the world stage. All over the place, things were running amuck.
A domino. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese brought it closer to home, and bombed Pearl Harbor. Many lives were lost there. It was tragic. And for the first time, in this “war” we felt the edge of the sword.
So, another domino. Ten weeks after the bombing, our U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an Executive Order. Specifically, it was Executive Order # 9066.
This order authorized the removal of “any or all people from military areas as deemed necessary or desirable.” There is the wording for you. Deemed. Yes, deem is to regard or consider in a specified way. The tricky part of the order is this. It didn’t really map out who the “Grand Pooh Bah” of the Deeming was, or the “necessary” that might ensue. And so it goes.
Domino. Again. The military, in turn, defined — or deemed — the entire West Coast as a military area. The entire West Coast. And. Coincidentally. This was home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship.
Another domino tumbles. By June, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to remote internment camps. Can you imagine? These people, these families, were U.S. Citizens. And the military, one day, comes charging in and rips them from their lives and their homes. They were cast into internment camps which were built by the U.S. military in scattered locations around the country.
This was not just an over-nighter. Nope. For the next two and a half years, many of these Japanese Americans endured extremely difficult living conditions. Shacks, at best. Not only that, they endured poor treatment by their military guards. The stories are deplorable.
It was not until January 2, 1945 that they could return to their homes. (An issuance of Proclamation No. 21, to be exact.)
And guess what. During WWII, they found that ten Americans were spying for Japan. All ten were convicted. BUT. Not one of them was of Japanese ancestry.
The whole big pile of fallen dominoes scares the living-holy-heck out of me.
Our government has had a way of doing this. Condemning U.S. Citizens that don’t line up with things that are “deemed necessary.” The American Indians are another sad example.
I hope, we are careful, never to let this happen again.
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“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
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“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”
― Honore de Balzac
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